Snowjob

by Ted Wood

  “But hold on now.” I struck one finger in the air. “He won’t have to dig far to see you’re at the back of this. In fact they already know you are. That’s why they snatched Angie.”

  “I figure that was Manatelli’s palace guard,” Doug said. “They work for Mucci but they take their orders from Manatelli.” He shrugged. “It was the same with us. All us grunts worked for the president of the U.S. of A. but we took orders from whatever shavetail they put in charge.”

  It made sense and I nodded. “Okay then. So let’s think about this Grant killing. Why would they knife him and throw his body on the slopes of Cat’s Cradle?”

  “Orders from Manatelli,” Doug said without hesitation. “I guess he figured Huckmeyer wasn’t fulfilling his commitment to keep the operation quiet. He wanted Huckmeyer to know he isn’t dealing with the Knights of Columbus.”

  “But killing Grant is a bit heavy for that. Surely they’d have gone to Huckmeyer and stuck a gun in his ear just to remind him.”

  Doug had the obvious answer. “Grant must have done something to make them think he was going to open up. They wanted him quiet. They did it their usual way. And leaned on Huckmeyer at the same time.”

  “Okay. I can buy that. But I guess I should bring you up to speed on what’s been happening since I came to see you yesterday. Like for instance, Will Lord saw Grant talking to a guy who sounds to me like the one who snatched Angie. This was before Grant and his buddies came to Brewskis to jump me.”

  “Planning to jump you? I know something wait on. You said Maloney got you out of a jam. But what in hell did happen?”

  I took a couple of minutes to fill him in and he listened, asking careful questions until he was up to date on all the events of the last twenty-four hours. Then he said, “Maybe they were ticked off when Grant didn’t do like they’d planned. But how did they know? Unless this guy he was talking to followed him to Brewskis and saw what went down.”

  “Maybe he did, but I doubt it. My guess is that somebody filled him in after.”

  “Wendy Tate,” Doug said slowly. “I’ll bet this guy had picked her up. It didn’t take much. Then, he was at her place and Grant came over and he heard what had happened.”

  “Makes sense, if this Wendy Tate was that kind of woman. But why kill her?”

  Doug threw up his hands. “Maybe she heard more than the guy wanted. Maybe she got antsy when it looked like this mob guy was going to kill Grant. Maybe he even killed Grant right there in front of her and had to shut her up. Who knows? But it all holds water.

  “There’s one other thing,” I said, remembering what f Maloney had told me. “I heard that Grant was a gambler. A couple of times he’d lost big. Once he sold his car overnight to pay the tab. Second time his father had an out-of-season discount sale at the store to raise cash. Maybe he was in Dutch again and this time they offered him the chance of paying his debt by chasing me out of town. When he screwed up they came after him for payment.”

  Doug stood up and walked to the window, staring out blankly at the snow while he thought. “There’s a million maybes. I’m just wondering if the guys in the department will think of them.”

  I sat where I was, trying to be the voice of reason. “So what if they don’t? What can I do to steer them right?”

  We talked it over for an hour, not getting any closer to a solution. The best we could come up with, now that the chief had asked me to remove myself from the investigation, was to pass our ideas on to Pat Hinton and have him bring them up in the daily progress meetings the detectives would hold until the case was cleared up. When we’d resolved all that I said, “Okay, so if I’m going to help clear you of the Cindy Laver murder, I need to know exactly what happened between you that night. Like why was she angry? The waitress said you seemed to be having a fight.”

  “She was scared,” he said.

  “Suddenly? She’d been going along with you for a couple of weeks. Why was she scared then? Had someone threatened her?”

  “Yeah. She told me that someone had left her a note. It said ‘We don’t like you playing around with that cop. You’ll be healthier if you stop.’”

  “Did you see the note?”

  “No. She didn’t even tell me about it for the first hour. That’s why we were arguing. She told me it was over, she wasn’t going along with it anymore.”

  “Yet she still went to Brewskis with you. She didn’t tell you this when you met her?”

  Doug looked miserable. “This is the bit that eats me up, Reid. When I met her she was all for saying goodbye there and then. I managed to calm her down some and get her to agree to come for a drink. If I hadn’t, she would never have been murdered. I’ve thought about that every minute since they came and told me she was killed.”

  “That’s just punishing yourself. They may have been waiting to kill her anyway. But in any case, you figured she was just sore, so you kept on like this was a normal night?”

  He held up one hand, finger and thumb apart. “I was this close to finding out where the money came from to buy those credit card slips. Hell, Reid. You know what it’s like when you’re on a case and it starts to break your way.”

  “Why hadn’t she told you already? Surely it would be a matter of record in her office. If she was going to tell you, she could have told you right off.”

  “She never got to see the records of where it came from. The money was delivered by a cash courier service. It was always accepted by Huckmeyer and he signed the receipt slip for the money. But he was planning to be out of town that Friday. There was a meeting of some ski group. She’d told me about it and we both knew this was her chance to get into his files and find out where the money was coming from.”

  “Then what? Were you planning to go there and investigate? What good would that have done?”

  “No.” He had trouble containing his tension and he stood up and went over to the window. “No. I was going to get the message to Mucci. Let him know that Manatelli was shipping in money to this place from wherever. Once I knew where it was coming from it would have given Mucci proof that the cash wasn’t his. That would have been the end of Manatelli, the end of the whole business.”

  I waited so long before answering that he turned to look at me, wondering. Then I said, “That’s not police work, Doug. That’s no better than the mob.”

  “Don’t preach at me,” he shouted. “You know how goddamn far you get as a cop fighting them legally. Nowhere, that’s how far. By the time they’ve bought the judges and frightened the juries they walk, all of them, always. They walk right back into the street and round up more little lads to peddle their asses. And they go on, driving their Cadillacs, balling their high-priced women.”

  “This isn’t a movie. This is real life. The only thing we’ve got going for us is the law. I know how the lawmakers and the judges and the bleeding hearts screw things up for the police. Hell, I’ve been a cop as long as you have. But you don’t stop them with death squads or by getting them killing one another.”

  He was about to shout again but instead he controlled himself and sat down, rigidly, on a kitchen chair. “Okay, Mr. Bennett,” he said softly. “What would you do instead?”

  “I’d call in whoever’s needed, FBI, I guess, and have them investigate the operations of the bank. It takes longer but all the t’s are crossed and the i’s dotted. They make their case, or even if they don’t, there’s enough mud flies that word of it gets back to Manatelli, maybe even to Mucci. It could be that the outcome is the same. Manatelli sleeps with the fishes. But at least I’d be able to sleep nights without feeling as much of a scumbag as he is.”

  His voice was just as low. “This isn’t personal with you.”

  “You can’t afford to let it get personal. If it gets down to one on one, we can tackle it the way we tackled Charlie in Nam. You kill him or he kills you. But you don’t hate everybody with the wrong shape eyes.”

  “You’ve had it too soft, living in Canada,” he said. “You shoul
d’ve come back to a war zone, same as I did in Harlem. Then you’d have known what crime is all about. It’s not about some guy fishing out of season or failing to stop at an intersection. It’s about welfare mothers hooked on crack, blowing their goddamn food stamps while their kids go hungry.”

  I waved my hand in dismissal. “You may be right, but there’s a time for philosophy and there’s a time for getting things done. Right now what matters is clearing you of the charges against you. First the murder. Then the money. After that we handle the big things. Okay?”

  He was still sure he was right, still angry. But he bit off his reply and said, “All right.”

  “Fine. Then the first thing I want to do is to go check the crime scene. It may not turn anything up but it’s step one. Then tomorrow I’ll get the prints of the women at the bar, compare them with the beer can found in the garbage. I’ll get on it now.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said in a deadly flat voice. “I’ll sit here and wait like a good little citizen.”

  I nodded and got up. “See you later.”

  “Sure,” he said and I put my parka on and whistled Sam and went out to my car.

  Cindy Layer’s landlady was a stout little woman wearing a good blue dress that looked like it was her Sunday uniform. It took ten minutes of waiting on her doorstep while she phoned the chief but at last she let me in and showed me up to the flat where Cindy Laver had lived and died.

  She came with me, talking the whole time. “If s horrible. I count on the rent from this place to supplement my pension. Nobody’s ever going to rent it now. I can’t even open it up yet anyway. The police haven’t finished with it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  I wasn’t really paying attention but just to be agreeable I said, “Rent it by the week to skiers. You can charge more and they won’t know its history.” We had come in through the front door and up her main staircase. If it was the only entrance the case against Doug looked that much blacker. “Is this the only way in?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. She unlocked the door and bustled in ahead of me. She intended to stay there the whole time, talking, I could see that.

  “Mrs. Tibbet, I’d like to examine the place in boring detail if you don’t mind. I’m a trained investigator and I won’t damage anything. I wonder could you let me stay here alone please.”

  “Are you ordering me out of my own house?” Her hackles were rising.

  “Nothing so bad-mannered, I hope. It’s just that I have to concentrate very hard and your presence will be a distraction.”

  This made her almost respectful. “Are you a psychic?”

  “No, I’m an ordinary homicide detective from another jurisdiction. After I’m through I’d very much like to talk to you at length. Perhaps I could take you for a cup of coffee or something.”

  “Oh, I have coffee,” she said. “I’ll go put the pot on. Come on down when you’re through.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You’re very understanding.” I gave her a big, sunny smile and stood while she backed out reluctantly, then closed the door behind her. Score one for my silver tongue.

  When she’d gone I stood for a minute in the room, Cindy Laver’s living room, getting a feel for the dead woman’s life and tastes. She hadn’t furnished the place, that was evident, but the pictures were hers, I was sure. They were art posters. One was a gaudy poster from an exhibition of Fauvist painting, whatever that is, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Another was from some other gallery, Monet’s water lilies. There was a book on the coffee table, more art, the Impressionists. A woman with taste, obviously.

  The investigators hadn’t disturbed things. There was a trace of fingerprint powder around the light switch but the couch was untouched. The cushion at one end of the couch was dinted as if someone had just gotten up from sitting there. No doubt it had been photographed but nobody had sat down since the night she was killed. Perhaps she and Doug had been the last people here, sitting arguing white downstairs Mrs. Tibbet strained her ears.

  Acting on instinct, I sat down, at the right-hand end, the one where there was no cushion, the place a man would have sat. Also on instinct, I slid my fingers down the side of the couch. I was right; there were coins there, a sure sign that a man had sat here before and money had tipped out of his pocket. I probed deeper, squeezing my weight down to widen the crack, and then my fingers encountered something else. It was a pocketknife.

  I got up and went through to the bedroom closet and got a wire coat hanger. There were a number of them, one with the plastic sheet still draped on it. I brought it through, slipping the sheet off the hanger and setting it on the coffee table. Then I bent the hanger into a hook and sat down, scrunching my weight on the end of the seat again, and probed in the gap with the folded hanger until I managed to fish out the knife. It was a small, expensive pocketknife with a little shield set into its bone handle. I bent closer and looked at the shield but my run of luck was over. It had nothing on it.

  I laid the plastic wrap on the couch and flicked the knife onto it with the hanger, then I bundled the sheet around the knife and knotted it, making a clear evidence bag. Jack Grant had worked in a hardware store. He would have carried a pocketknife and this was a good one, the kind he’d have picked up from choice from the display in the store. But it still didn’t mean he had killed Cindy Laver. Chances are he wouldn’t have sat on the couch that night, not if he’d come to murder her, but finding the knife diffused the case against Doug and that was valuable.

  I searched the rest of the apartment, finding nothing, except for the one fact that Mrs. Tibbet hadn’t told me. There was a fire escape from the kitchen window. It was a black-painted iron staircase that led all the way to the ground, the kind of fire precaution you find only in small towns where there isn’t the fear of burglary that stops most big-city fire escapes a whole floor above the ground, with a drop ladder for the last ten feet. I wondered if it had been checked as carefully as the rest of the apartment and made a note to ask the chief. To save discussion with Mrs. Tibbet about my evidence I used the escape to go down and put the knife in my car, taking a moment to fuss Sam. Then I went back up and wiped my feet carefully free of snow before climbing back through the window and going downstairs for coffee.

  I didn’t learn much from my talk, except that Mrs. Tibbet had been upset by Doug’s presence. Not because he was black, she insisted, but because he was married to that nice Melody who was so wonderful at the library and such a pretty girl. And such nice kids, etc. I nursed the conversation around to Cindy Laver’s life before she had become involved with Doug and was told that she had been a very quiet young woman who never brought gentlemen home. She had lived there from the first month she came to town. Sometimes she had come home very late and once or twice had never come home at all but you knew what young people are. She had stayed with friends or something like that.

  The only thing I did work out was that the fire escape came down beside the kitchen window of the lower floor. If Mrs. Tibbet had been in bed she would probably not have heard or seen anybody using the back entrance to Cindy’s place.

  I thanked her for her help and left, driving directly to the police station. A different uniformed man was on duty but I guess word of my involvement had spread. As soon as I gave my name he went into the chief’s office and I was allowed in.

  The chief was looking tired and I thought I could smell whisky on his breath, but he accepted my evidence gravely, handling it with the proper care, and said he would have it fingerprinted and added to the evidence file in the case.

  “Any advances on his killing, or Ms. Tate’s?” I asked. He shook his head and assured me that the investigation was still proceeding. He countered by asking me what I intended to do next and I told him I would be asking around for anything that might help. I didn’t mention my fingerprint plan for the workers at the bar. And that was it. I was out of his office within ten minutes and on my way back to the Ford house. When I got there I found
a strange car in the driveway, a black Cadillac.

  Doug met me at the door. “Good timing,” he said tonelessly. “You’ve got a visitor.”

  I followed him in carefully, pausing to shuck my overshoes and coat, wondering if one of Manatelli’s men had come calling. But the man in the living room was a spare-looking Norman Rockwell Yankee. I recognized him from the glimpse I’d had at his own front door. It was Jack Grant’s father.

  He was nursing a drink and he stood up, setting the drink aside. “Mr. Bennett.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Paul Grant.”

  “Sir.” I shook his hand. It was cool from his glass but firm and hard, a working hand.

  “Siddown,” Doug said. “You like a taste, Reid?”

  “Please.” I sat and waited for Grant to start.

  He cleared his throat first, a nervous clatter like the bolt action of an old rifle. “I’m sorry to intrude,” he said.

  “You’re not intruding. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  He squinched his eyes. “Are you a family man, Mr. Bennett?”

  “I have a daughter.”

  “Then I guess you know how I’m feeling,” he said. He sat silent for a moment, gathering strength to continue. “My son was no angel. I’d be lying if I told you that. But he was my son and now he’s dead and I want to know why and who did it.”

  “The police investigation will find that out, Mr. Grant. You have a good department here. They’ll get the guy who did this.”

  “Maybe they will.” He lowered his head for a moment, and stared into his glass, sightlessly. “But now there’s a dead woman as well, shot, I’m told, with a gun like Jack’s. I’m afraid they’re going to use my boy as a scapegoat for her killing.”

  The thought had occurred to me. Police everywhere love to close files. It looks good the next time you go to the city fathers for money. I discounted it here. The man was in pain. “They’re good men. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.”